RK Rules Poll

[Odinn]

Please visit this link for a poll:

http://www.polldaddy.com/p/228768/

Sorry I have to use this version until Nemesis fixes something for me. Please vote and leave any responses here.

Thanks! Odinn

[Odinn]

An interesting idea regarding storm crystals:

What if they were reverted back to the old system where sometimes they failed and if they do fail they perhaps run a check on the next one, and so on, subsequently using more and more storm crystals until players are protected?

So if it takes 3 to roll a save, then you lose 3 storm crystals?

Thoughts?

[Odinn]

What are RK rules you may ask.

Simple put, RK rules are restrictions put into the nodeka code to decrease the chance of player RDeath.

Current Rules( as best I know ):
When player A is fighting a mob and player B attacks player A, if the mobile gets the kill hit on Player A, then it its treated as a PDeath and not a RDeath.

When a player with a PK flag attacks another player fighting a mobile who does not have a PK flag the PK Flagged player may not flee from combat.

Players who are fighting mobiles may not be attacked with targeted ranged attacks(ex throw, telekinetic projection, shoot, etc)

I will add more as I think of them or am reminded of them.

[Serenity]

There would need to be a way to get them ingame. You can not play about with something you have NO choice but to pay cash for. Or for those about to say plat for donations.. someone has to pay cash if not the receiver.

[Odinn]

Serenity wrote:
There would need to be a way to get them ingame. You can not play about with something you have NO choice but to pay cash for. Or for those about to say plat for donations.. someone has to pay cash if not the receiver.

RE: Storm Crystals and suggested change-

Storm Crystals weren\'t a guaranteed thing for many years. There is no real reason for them to be guaranteed. If you play from work that is a choice you have to make yourself. I understand bosses coming in and having to jump ship, it still doesn\'t change the fact that botters are too lax about things these days.

If players were zapped for botting like they used to be, people wouldn\'t bot.
If botters could get rkilled more easily, they would\'t bot.

Eventually something is going to have to happen within nodeka. If we keep protecting botters, then nodeka will begin rolling down hill at a pace which only a brick wall could stop.

But yes- players should be able to get a storm crystal via nodeka, perhaps per 400 rp points?( artistry crafters get 30 rp points a tech gain, so don\'t tell me its impossible )

If others wish to further this discussion of storm crystals gained in game, lets open another post so others can follow discussion in a linear fashion.

[Redwolfe]

What do you mean by changing the RK rules? You mentioned in game that you would like to end botting totally... But I don\'t understand how the RK rules come into play to help that?

In a way, it seems to maybe promote PK\'ing.. but PK\'s are flawed.. There is no lose to you being PK\'ed.. So there\'s no fear there.. And even to be the person doing the killing.. You might be getting 1-3 RP..

There would need to be quite a few things to be fixed or adjusted to make botting more risky, promote PK\'ing without it being what it is now. Either RPA which is fine. Or a revenge tool taken to the extreme where some players are forced to quit playing. Now I understand the personal satisfaction in that you got someone to quit a game because of you, but ultimately your stabbing yourself in the foot with a lower player base.

So, there\'s a
botting issue - big players bot and maintain if not grow the gap from the newer players trying to catch up

Clan Issue - like mentioned before.. two clans control the mud to a degree, and they aren\'t fighting each other, so that leaves the rest of us as their play toys

PK issue - no real downsides to being PK\'ed other than the annoyance of regening.. Or your slowing if not hinder the growth of certain players.. We chatted about the issue of being able to lockdown players too easily.. Some suggestions were high Prevents on skills such as Spy, visit, portal.. high as in 30-45mins.. Maybe actually making what the help PK files says.. If you target a single person and repeatedly kill them that they will grow from that.. I think I get like 200K from a death.. Not sure if its fixed or random or how it works.. But trust me, being repeatedly killed in no way helps you grow other than, don\'t get in that situation again.. Easy fix would be to remove that wording from the help file :) .. I say thats easy, because if you do give some type of bonus for people killed a lot.. You would just have people doing it to get that bonus instead of running experience..

And something to look forward to after lvl 300. Yes you do have maxxing all your stats.. Then what.. The crafting is a good move, but there really aren\'t any help files on that for newer players to easily get started on that..

So you bot more, get more gold, so you can train your pools up.... Bot more for money to purchase better EQ from the bigger players.. Then you can explore newer areas a little more safely.. Till then, you stick to where the GPM is the best..

My rant is over..

[Odinn]

Redwolfe wrote:
What do you mean by changing the RK rules? You mentioned in game that you would like to end botting totally... But I don\'t understand how the RK rules come into play to help that?

In a way, it seems to maybe promote PK\'ing.. but PK\'s are flawed.. There is no lose to you being PK\'ed.. So there\'s no fear there.. And even to be the person doing the killing.. You might be getting 1-3 RP..

There would need to be quite a few things to be fixed or adjusted to make botting more risky, promote PK\'ing without it being what it is now. Either RPA which is fine. Or a revenge tool taken to the extreme where some players are forced to quit playing. Now I understand the personal satisfaction in that you got someone to quit a game because of you, but ultimately your stabbing yourself in the foot with a lower player base.

So, there\'s a
botting issue - big players bot and maintain if not grow the gap from the newer players trying to catch up

Clan Issue - like mentioned before.. two clans control the mud to a degree, and they aren\'t fighting each other, so that leaves the rest of us as their play toys

PK issue - no real downsides to being PK\'ed other than the annoyance of regening.. Or your slowing if not hinder the growth of certain players.. We chatted about the issue of being able to lockdown players too easily.. Some suggestions were high Prevents on skills such as Spy, visit, portal.. high as in 30-45mins.. Maybe actually making what the help PK files says.. If you target a single person and repeatedly kill them that they will grow from that.. I think I get like 200K from a death.. Not sure if its fixed or random or how it works.. But trust me, being repeatedly killed in no way helps you grow other than, don\'t get in that situation again.. Easy fix would be to remove that wording from the help file :) .. I say thats easy, because if you do give some type of bonus for people killed a lot.. You would just have people doing it to get that bonus instead of running experience..

And something to look forward to after lvl 300. Yes you do have maxxing all your stats.. Then what.. The crafting is a good move, but there really aren\'t any help files on that for newer players to easily get started on that..

So you bot more, get more gold, so you can train your pools up.... Bot more for money to purchase better EQ from the bigger players.. Then you can explore newer areas a little more safely.. Till then, you stick to where the GPM is the best..

My rant is over..

What I have mentioned above as RK rules are ways to stop players from RKilling others.

Imagine for a second if I could use \'shoot\' while you were fighting some mobs and drop you to 100 health and suddenly you get hit by a mob for 100 health... boom you just got rkilled.

Thus we promote RKilling and botters lose big time.

[Redwolfe]

The flip side is.. You will see bigger players running lower lvl areas where they aren\'t even hit 95% of the time.. So, if you were shooting them.. Then it would be a PK, and they don\'t drop a corpse..

[Odinn]

Redwolfe wrote:
The flip side is.. You will see bigger players running lower lvl areas where they aren\'t even hit 95% of the time.. So, if you were shooting them.. Then it would be a PK, and they don\'t drop a corpse..

There are only so many lower level areas, no paladin will sacrifice the rates of whitelion for dnari etc, etc.

And most players wont move areas until they get rked once or twice. By then they will be pretty scared to bot.

In addition if mobs need their difficulty increased I imagine that wouldn\'t be too hard to accomplish. Even if it increased PK, thats atleast a positive.

[Redwolfe]

Well, you see it now, big players running areas they get the best GPM in until they get stats/pool increased or better Eq. Which kind of slows down the exploring for new areas to fight for some people.

How many people are attacking the Odinn/Meier/Gideous/Werewolf type players? Or for that matter the Aug 1+ players? You don\'t see the huge players fighting or PK\'ing.. They are crafting and botting heavily.. They are also in clans that others won\'t touch or start trouble with.. So this would hurt the smaller botting players..

Or, we have what Dager did.. He RK\'ed or came across Nemesis deathpile.. He took the stuff.. Ainur put him on KOS/lockdown until he finally gave in and gave the stuff back..

I see smaller players getting hit by the biger ones and losing all their EQ.. Or.. I\'ll create an Alt.. put all my EQ on the alt to hold. Use crap Eq, and bot a lesser area, and when I really want to fight and be at keys.. Get my other EQ.. I now just avoided losing any of my good gear..

Or we see better scripts/bots created, that will haul a$$ back to corpse to recover it. I know its possible with the way my bot works to determine where, and then its just a matter of triggers to get the corpse.. You\'ll see people turning PKP on when botting.. 1-2 ticks for big players to recover enough to get back to their corpse.. Again, smaller players with smaller pools would suffer, since they would have to wait longer to regen to get back to their corpse..

[Redwolfe]

I thought about this a little more.. I prob could counter and figure a way around whatever you come up with onthe RK rules..

You want to lesson botting, by promoting more PK\'ing and possibly a fear of a lose.. But PK is kinda broken too.. So you can\'t really fix/adjust one item, and leave PK still broken..

And then, you need to get people to go out there and PK. Right now, all I can see happening is the bigger players hitting on the smaller players, cause the others players that might be considered their equal are in their clan, or in another one that they won\'t fight with.. Or the fear of it being way to easy to stop someone from playing the game..

[Iron]

I think relaxing the RK rules would be a bad idea. In the long run, I think it would end up running off the smaller players from the game. Here's why.

Smaller players are less likely to have a back-up set of equipment or alts with equipment etc. If they get RK'd they are probably going to be left naked with no real ability to get even decent equipment back as they probably had to buy the equipment they had to begin with. Consider how large and well equipped someone has to be to actually get decent equipment as a major (if they are solo) or how much plats they have to spend and how likely it is that smaller players are going to have 100k plats just sitting around. They certainly aren't going to be able to go out and get revenge or the like to get equipment back. So players who spent a long time (and probably real money) to finally get their first decent set of equipment so that they can run at a moderate level, can in a moments notice find themselves standing around with absolutely nothing.

You will end up with 2 scenarios. One, there will be a smaller player who (particularly just after 2 SU weeks) will have one or 2 pieces of good equipment that a larger player(s) wants. The smaller player will become hunted constantly until someone succeeds in getting said equipment. Two, you will end up with grief players who just run around trying to RK the smaller players and then ransoming their eq back for donations if the smaller player didn't have anything particularly useful. There will be some killing of larger players. There will be wars that break out and there will be lots and lots of drama on gossip. For the most part though, smaller players will take the brunt of the assault and many will end up leaving.

Nodeka is designed to make players work long and hard to build their characters up. Equipment is difficult to get and fairly rare. You can't just go out and build up your equipment to as good (or almost as good) in a week. When you add to that the fact that people just spent real money to get marbles to make that equipment essentially irreplaceable, suddenly changing the rules so that someone twice their size can not only kill them at will, but also have a good chance to take away everything they have spent long periods of time and real money to build does not go over well.

I will fully admit that I am one of those lowbies. I get slaughtered by the big players on a daily basis. That is part of the game, it generally doesn't bother me. If they changed the rules at this point to make RKing much easier and I lost everything because if it, I wouldn't ever be back. I would not spend months or a year and more money to try to rebuild my character when someone can just come along and take it all away again at will.

If the rules changed, someone who is Aug 5 would easily be able to find a way to RK a player with 10k-20k hps whether they are botting or not. People would quickly find a way to RK more or less at will. Not to mention how things like lag/prevent on ranged attacks and the such would become major issues. There would be constant calls for toning and changes (a.k.a the reason the rules were put into place to begin with). "Oops, we tried to improve class A, now they can RK in seconds". Does that become a bug that requires reimbursement or are you just SOL?

Just like there cannot be a pwipe because of the huge time and actual money investment that people have in the game, you have to consider the same things when you are looking to change rules that can dramatically affect players like this.

I do agree though that botting is a huge problem. Botting has resulted in so many of the imbalances that are in the game today or have caused major recoding to balance things in the past. Nodeka is a game. Games are supposed to be played, not a practice in how well you can write a script (or download one). Instead of changing the RK rules to prevent botting, which is casting a large net at a targeted problem, why not change the PK rules to specifically make botting a hazard.

Idea: When a player is PK'd, have it automatically trigger a botcheck with the standard retry attempts. Give PK protection until the botcheck is completed (pass or fail). Double or triple the reward for passing the botcheck, thus the helping the killee grow. If the botcheck is failed, take one item from the players inventory (worn or carried, containers take everything in them also) completely at random and give it to the player who PK'd them along with normal bot-check failure penalties. Don't allow storm crystals to protect from this. For majors, I would even go so far as to exclude items from the random selection that have a value less than 200k, empty containers, and definitely summoned items. This would keep people from being able to load their inventory with bandages or throwing items in order to weight the odds of losing a "real" item in their favor.

This would give a strong incentive for players to police themselves by PKing (suspected) botters. People would become very wary of botting because of the possibility of losing their "(phasing) Boomstick". What it doesn't give is an incentive for grief players to start a wholesale lowbie hunt or a reason for player A to try to RK player B all day long because they want that "(shining) a pink ribbon" that player B refuses to sell them. This also allows players to keep their storm crystals to protect them from the environment and encourages players to experiment with new areas/mobs without total fear or dying.


Idea 2: Add a possibility of losing and Augmentation point to failing a bot check. That is something you cannot recover from in a day or 2. While this only affects players who are already Augmented, smaller players are already much more likely to be PK'd or otherwise interrupted while botting anyway and cannot recover from the current affects of a failed bot check as quickly anyway.


Just my 2 cents on the topic.
Iron

[Eternal1]

Absolutely...rk rules should be revoked and to balance it out storm crystals should be easier to acquire. If you are botting....you should be at risk, period. I agree with Odinn that this game is going to go downhill fast if the immortals don't change things so players have to be more involved. Peace

[Eulogy]

I've argued (unsuccessfully) in the past, that failing a botcheck should cost augments. I even went so far as to describe what the process should be like. E.g. a player fails a botcheck, they are recalled, and the process of augmenting takes place, the player receives all sun stones that they would be over with their decreased augment and all platinum back from pools trained over their "new" cap. So, in reality, all the botter has lost is time. The normal rules for failing a botcheck would still be in effect stat loss and etc.

I've never failed a botcheck so I don't know the specifics of what happens for failing one. Perhaps the person could lose all experience and gold in addition to the normal affects?

[Torment]

As it stands now failing a bot check is the only way to rdie, granted always the special mob drag cases, but all and all I seen more fools rkill themselves while running and failing a botcheck. That being said, the old way of rkilling while it was effective at the time, wouldn't mean much now, being the scripting has gotten alot better. Fairly easy to to add a safe fail to a script to prevent rdying. I'd guess if you did the shooting way, the person being shot would have to incur lag or some shit to stop the triggers. I for one liked before in the past you could attack a player running, get out, and if's botting and the script is still attacking, boom, dead. I just think that Palm, a skill that was heavily used 5 years ago, is pretty much non existent nowadays, it's a shame because that was a highly wanted skill, back in the terror days :)

[woman]

Imm's won't touch a single concept said in this thread. They changed the rooms between Raash and temple to !summon when I put 20 mercs there to RK people. They changed group teleports to not make you stand up when I RK'd Krull. If you find a way to RK someone it will be changed within a week to prevent it.

[Fenulia]

I just think that Palm, a skill that was heavily used 5 years ago, is pretty much non existent nowadays, it's a shame because that was a highly wanted skill, back in the terror days :)

I never quite liked that skill. It was pretty much guaranteed to work as long as you had the %, and the other party had no defense against it(beyond not dying in the first place). Reminds me of another game I played, where players with a Rob skill could steal your stuff, but unless you had the Rob skill as well(and knew what they were stealing), you couldn't do shit about it. Primarily there just to grief.:(

[Darsinius]

Failed botchecks = RDeath.:cool: